When you’re just launching a company or you’re trying to grow a small business you don’t have the massive marketing budget or penetrating brand recognition of major multinationals. Developing a solid marketing plan is key to successfully bringing in new customers and building a thriving business. Watch this week’s video to learn the basics of creating a solid marketing plan for your business’ success:

Many aspiring entrepreneurs are tripped up by a common fear that sidelines their businesses before they even get started: a fear of sharing their idea. While it’s natural to want to protect your “billion dollar idea” so that you can maintain control and build the business of your dreams, if the fear of someone stealing your idea prevents you from seeking out advice, feedback, and mentorship it can easily prevent your success. Watch this week’s video to find out why this fear is so damaging and how to prevent it from crippling your company before it even launches.

Naturally, one of the biggest struggles for any new business is marketing. They don’t have the name recognition they need but they also don’t have the money to fund major marketing projects or pay for a public relations team. That’s why entrepreneurs have to learn a few tricks to try to get their names out into the press and in front of potential customers and one of those tricks is the service Help a Reporter Out. Watch this week’s video to learn what HARO is, why you should be using it, and how to get started.

Update: I got a note from the folks over at MonkeyLearn who said, “we recently discovered that some experts sources are using MonkeyLearn to create personalized alerts for HARO requests. This helps them speed up the process of answering relevant HARO queries and save time. With this in mind, we wrote a guide about automating this process in four easy steps (without writing a single line of code).”

I haven’t tried it yet but I’m interested in anything that helps me save time so I wanted to share. Let me know if you give it a try and find it helpful. Again, here’s the link to their guide.

Last week I talked about how to manage your business from anywhere so that you can take full advantage of the freedom that entrepreneurship gives you and travel the world if you’d like. This week, as promised, I want to share some of the tools I use to help me while I manage my businesses remotely. Some of them may be familiar to you while some may be brand new but they’re all incredibly useful so check out the video below and then let me know in the comments what tools you use to help you manage your business(es) as you travel.

As you’ll know if you’ve explored the other pages on my website, I’m a full-time nomad and I’ve spent this year traveling through Latin America to explore the entrepreneurial ecosystems in the region. The fact that I have no real home base hasn’t stopped me from running my businesses, so I was recently asked to write a guest post for Under30CEO about how to live life as an entrepreneurial nomad. I got such a great response from that piece that I figured I should adapt it for video and share it here, in case some of you would love the freedom of being a nomad.

Unfortunately, the number of hackers out there that take pleasure in destroying small business websites just to prove that they can is growing. It’s become a game to them, but it’s completely devastating to a small business when its site is compromised and it needs to shut down, restore, and relaunch. Not only do the entrepreneurs who are victims of these attacks have to deal with lost revenue and customer trust created by the site’s inaccessibility but also they have to pay hefty fees to get everything secured and back up and running. For many small businesses this is simply too much and they are forced to close after such an attack.

While there is no way to completely hack-proof your company’s website, there are ways to make it more secure so that you will be less likely to be a target. Check out this week’s video to see some tips that I learned the hard way to help you keep your company website safe.

Two of my most watched videos are those about Porter’s 5 Forces Analysis and SWOT Analysis and I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about how helpful both are. I have also, however, received quite a few questions that imply a number of you are still confused about how to use them. When multiple people have the same question it always means one thing for me: it’s time to make a video to answer it. So this week I’ll give you a little more explanation about how to apply Porter’s 5 Forces Model and SWOT Analysis.

Word of mouth is hands down the most effective marketing technique for any small business or startup and, with an ever-growing number of avenues for your customers to help spread the word, you should absolutely be taking full advantage. However, it’s tough to stand out from the crowd enough that others will start publicly singing your praises.

With that said, there are ways to encourage your happy customers to spread the word. Check out the video below for tips to get your supporters talking:

Even though it’s expensive, legally protecting your new business from disasters and positioning it for success is one of the most important things you can do when getting started. If you neglect the legal issues upfront, it will only be more painful and more expensive when everything blows up in the future. However, since most startup and small business owners don’t have tons of cash lying around to pay lawyers with, this week’s video shares a few quick hacks to help you save on startup legal fees:

Marketing partnerships are a great way for business owners to amplify their marketing reach without creating much extra work or expense. The basic idea is to find another business whose customers are the same as yours but that offers a complementary – not competing – product or service. Then you team up and both help promote the other to all of your customers.

This tactic can be hugely successfully without too much effort, so check out the video below to learn how to implement it: